Firefox - Home users only?

osaddictosaddict London, UK
edited December 2009 in Science & Tech
I've been accused of having a 'home user mentality' by allowing both IE and Firefox to be installed and used on the machines in the office and to be rolled out on new builds.

As many of you on here are IT admins what's your take on this?!

Comments

  • CycloniteCyclonite Tampa, Florida Icrontian
    edited December 2009
    If your apps support it, nothing wrong with Firefox at the office. I use Firefox personally, but we don't push it out to our machines. Too many of our custom apps become unhappy in anything but IE.

    Of course, I understand the differences between IE and FF. Some users don't even realize when they're using a different browser.
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited December 2009
    I can understand the comment. At work I don't push out FF to machines for one primary reason. I can't control it through GP to the same degree I can IE. Also it means I don't have to support yet another browser because there are still websites out there that don't properly work in anything but IE. Which we tend to run into a lot through work. From online sites that we need to use for submitting RMA's and returning goods to other tracking sites and the like.

    However for some users that specifically request FF I will install it under some circumstances. But definitely not as a rule.
  • osaddictosaddict London, UK
    edited December 2009
    Ah ok, it seems perhaps I was at fault then - my theory was that many prefer it as a browser to IE and work better with it - I most certainly do.

    I know it's two browsers to support, but being an extensive user of Firefox myself I didn's see this as a huge burden. I did specifically say that anyone wanting Chrome or Opera would have to convince me they needed it and would be using it without support from me.

    I guess that was me thinking that was a good compromise between user choice / IT support, perhaps it was on the generous side!

    I hadn't thought of the GP side of things - we don't lock IE down that much.
  • AnnesAnnes Tripped Up by Libidos and Hubris Alexandria, VA Icrontian
    edited December 2009
    It really just depends on your companies policies and overall culture. At my job pretty much everyone uses FF and it is installed on every deployed machine. There are only one or two internal apps that people need IE for and they'll open it just for that.

    We don't lock anything down. We don't block anything on the internet. Actually, "home user mentality" is pretty much what we have here. We'll protect you as best we can through our firewalls and antivirus, but we expect you to not act like an idiot on the internet. It works for us.
  • osaddictosaddict London, UK
    edited December 2009
    Annes - that's pretty much the case here - on virtually every point you mention.

    So yeah, I guess the original comment makes sense, but it's highly dependant on the environment really. We're no Reuters or Bloomberg just yet!
  • QCHQCH Ancient Guru Chicago Area - USA Icrontian
    edited December 2009
    We started putting FF on systems for security sake back when we were forced to use IE6. It's a supported app here today. It's just not installed automatically.
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited December 2009
    We have a very small number of users here at my work, but I include Firefox exclusively in my builds. My overseers prefer it for security reasons.
  • chrisWhitechrisWhite Littleton, CO
    edited December 2009
    We push out Firefox on every build, everyone at my work hates IE, especially the vocal minority and we don't use GP to lock down anything. We actually spent significantly more time supporting IE then we do now that almost everyone uses Firefox primarily.

    I've experimented with pushing Chrome but it doesn't seem to deploy very elegantly and I'm the only one who uses is to I've just moved to keeping it on a USB drive and running it there when I really want it. Boss wasn't too happy when Chrome showed up on one of our test builds either :)
  • mtroxmtrox Minnesota
    edited December 2009
    kryyst wrote:
    At work I don't push out FF to machines for one primary reason. I can't control it through GP to the same degree I can IE.

    That's my only objection to it. But in environments where we don't excercise that kind of control, why would I care what they use?
    chrisWhite wrote:
    I've experimented with pushing Chrome but it doesn't seem to deploy very elegantly and I'm the only one who uses is to I've just moved to keeping it on a USB drive and running it there when I really want it.

    I've seen some real memory management problems with Chrome. I try to discourage it for that reason. Don't know if they've fixed that, or if there's a way to tweak it, but that goes to kryyst's other point. There's just a limit to how many browsers I can get smart on.
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